I spoke at Voxxed Zurich 2018 about Apache Kafka as Event-Driven Open Source Streaming Platform. The talk includes an intro to Apache Kafka and its open source ecosystem (Kafka Streams, Connect, KSQL, Schema Registry, etc.). Just want to share the video recording of my talk.

Abstract

This session introduces Apache Kafka, an event-driven open source streaming platform. Apache Kafka goes far beyond scalable, high volume messaging. In addition, you can leverage Kafka Connect for integration and the Kafka Streams API for building lightweight stream processing microservices in autonomous teams. The open source Confluent Platform adds further components such as a KSQL, Schema Registry, REST Proxy, Clients for different programming languages and Connectors for different technologies and databases. Live Demos included.

After three great years at TIBCO Software, I move back to open source and join Confluent, a company focusing on the open source project Apache Kafka to build mission-critical, scalable infrastructures for messaging, integration and streaming analytics. Confluent is a Silicon Valley startup, still in the beginning of its journey, with a 700% growing business in 2016, and is exjustpected to grow significantly in 2017 again.

In this blog post, I want to share why I see the future for middleware and big data analytics in open source technologies, why I really like Confluent, what I will focus on in the next months, and why I am so excited about this next step in my career.

Cloud-to-Cloud integration is part of a hybrid integration architecture. It enables to implement quick and agile integration scenarios without the burden of setting up complex VM- or container-based infrastructures. One key use case for cloud-to-cloud integration is innovation using a fail-fast methodology where you realize new ideas quickly. You typically think in days or weeks, not in months. If an idea fails, you throw it away and start another new idea. If the idea works well, you scale it out and bring it into production to a on premise, cloud or hybrid infrastructure. Finally, you make expose the idea and make it easily available to any interested service consumer in your enterprise, partners or public end users.

Abstract
Microservices are the next step after SOA: Services implement a limited set of functions; services are developed, deployed, and scaled independently; continuous delivery automates deployments. This way you get shorter time to results and increased flexibility. Containers improve things even more, offering a very lightweight and flexible deployment option.

The following shows a case study about successfully moving from a very complex monolith system to a cloud-native architecture. The architecture leverages containers and Microservices. This solve issues such as high efforts for extending the system, and a very slow deployment process. The old system included a few huge Java applications and a complex integration middleware deployment.

The new architecture allows flexible development, deployment and operations of business and integration services. Besides, it is vendor-agnostic so that you can leverage on-premise hardware, different public cloud infrastructures, and cloud-native PaaS platforms.

In October 2016, the open source IoT integration framework Flogo was published as first developer preview. This blog post is intended to give a first overview about Flogo. You can either browse through the slide deck or watch the videos.

What is Project Flogo?

In short, Flogo is an ultra-lightweight integration framework powered by Go programming language. It is open source under the permissive BSD license and easily extendable for your own use cases. Flogo is used to develop IoT edge apps or cloud-native / serverless microservices. Therefore, it is complementary to other integration solutions and IoT cloud platforms.

Like every year, I attended JavaOne (part of Oracle World) in San Francisco in late September 2016. This is still one of the biggest conferences around the world for technical experts like developers and architects.

I planned to write a blog posts about new trends from the program, exhibition and chats with other attendees. Though, I can make it short: Besides focus on Java platform updates (Java 9, Java EE 8, etc.), I saw three hot topics which are highly related to each other: Microservices, Docker and Cloud. It felt like 80% of non-Java talks were about these three topics. The other 20% were Internet of Things (IoT), DevOps and some other stuff. Middleware was also a hot topic. Not always directly, but I was in several talks focusing on integration, orchestration of microservices, (IoT) gateways.

The IT world is moving forward rapidly. The digital transformation changes complete industries and peels away existing business models. Cloud services, mobile devices, and the Internet of Things establish wild spaghetti architectures through different departments and lines of business. Several different concepts, technologies, and deployment options are used. A single integration backbone is not sufficient in this era anymore.

The IT world is moving forward fast. The digital transformation changes complete industries and peels away existing business models. Cloud services, mobile devices and the Internet of Things establish wild spaghetti architectures though different departments and lines of business. Several different concepts, technologies and deployment options are used. A single integration backbone is not sufficient anymore in this era of integration. Therefore, a Hybrid Integration Architecture is getting the new default in most enterprises.

Different user roles need to leverage different tools to integrate applications, services and APIs for their specific need. A key for success is that all integration and business services work together across different platforms in a hybrid world with on premise and cloud deployments.